Morbidly Humorous

My first thought upon reading about the "bus plunge" tradition was that it was horrible. Thinking about it, however, I can see how journalists could get this way. Since, as the saying goes, no news is good news, it can be generalized that anytime there's news--in most cases, anyways--it's bad. You'd have to find some kind of humor somewhere, because otherwise it would just be depressing. It is, admittedly, morbidly humorous that the newspapers are more or less parodying themselves with this.

I thought that this humor was rather sick, too. Of course, not all bus plunge stories involve horrible deaths; one of the stories I read had only injuries, and a baby was thrown out of the bus and miraculously was not hurt at all. When everybody is okay in the end, it doesn't seem like it's that bad to find the humor in it. However, even when there's death, if you report on it all the time I imagine you tend to put everybody's death in perspective. Yes, it's horrible that accidents like this happen, but in the end, although this seems kind of depressing to say, they're really just a part of life. I think journalists are more aware of this than other people, so like doctors, police, morticians, and anybody else who has to deal with death on a regular basis they have a realistic and (perhaps healthy?) big-picture view of it.